Yesterday at VMworld 2009, VMware announced the submission of its vCloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to enable consistent mobility, provisioning, management, and service assurance of applications running in internal and external clouds. The submission is part of the VMware vCloud Initiative – created to enable customers to work closely with VMware cloud partners who provide enterprise-ready cloud services without the lock-in associated with some cloud solutions available today.

Earlier this year, VMware released its vCloud API to partners to work with them to develop and deploy interoperable cloud services. With the availability of this API, customers have the ability to move their applications in and out of internal or external clouds.

“VMware is committed to open standards, and we are excited to submit the VMware vCloud API for consideration by the DMTF.  As customers choose to move more and more applications into the cloud, they need assurances that they will have choice amongst cloud vendors and not be artificially locked into one or the other. The VMware vCloud API provides for rich capabilities such as upload, download, instantiation, deployment and operation of vApps, networks and virtual datacenters, and we feel it is a great basis upon which to start the standardization process. Our ultimate goal is to provide cloud interoperability while still allowing vendors to have significant differentiated values to offer to their customers.”  - Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer and senior vice president of research and development, VMware

“VMware is among the industry leaders working within DMTF to promote open standards for the industry.  DMTF is pleased to receive this important contribution as input toward the goal of addressing open management interfaces for the cloud. The development of standards in this space will greatly benefit customers as they continue to adopt cloud computing.”  - said Mike Baskey, DMTF chairman of the board

Earlier this year, DMTF announced the formation of the “Open Cloud Standards Incubator,” a group dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The DMTF Open Cloud Standards incubator now has more than 35 companies participating including the 17 Leadership board member companies:  AMD, CA, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Rackspace, RedHat, Savvis, SunGard, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

For more information on the VMware vCloud API, visit www.vmware.com/go/vcloudapi.